North by Seamus Heaney

I. THE MINISTRY OF FEAR
     
For Seamus Deane
     
    Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
    In important places. The lonely scarp
    Of St Columb's College, where I billeted
    For six years, overlooked your Bogside.
    I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat
    Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,
    The throttle of the hare. In the first week
    I was so homesick I couldn't even eat
    The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.
    I threw them over the fence one night
    In September 1951
    When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road
    Were amber in the fog. It was an act
    Of stealth.
    Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
    Here's two on's are sophisticated,
    Dabbling in verses till they have become
    A life: from bulky envelopes arriving
    In vacation time to slim volumes
    Despatched 'with the author's compliments'.
    Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine
    Of your exercise-book, bewildered me---
    Vowels and ideas bandied free
    As the seed-pots blowing off our sycamores.
    I tried to write about the sycamores
    And innovated a South Derry rhyme
    With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.
    Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain
     
    Were walking, by God, all over the fine
    Lawns of elocution.
    Have our accents
    Changed? 'Catholics, in general, don't speak
    As well as students from the Protestant schools.'
    Remember that stuff? Inferiority
    Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.
    'What's your name, Heaney?'
    'Heaney, Father.'
    'Fair
    Enough.'
    On my first day, the leather strap
    Went epileptic in the Big Study,
    Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,
    But I still wrote home that a boarder's life
    Was not so bad, shying as usual.
     
    On long vacations, then, I came to life
    In the kissing seat of an Austin Sixteen
    Parked at a gable, the engine running,
    My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,
    A light left burning for her in the kitchen.
    And heading back for home, the summer's
    Freedom dwindling night by night, the air
    All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen
    Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round
    The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing
    The muzzle of a sten-gun in my eye:
    'What's your name, driver?'
    'Seamus...'
    Seamus?
     
    They once read my letters at a roadblock
    And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,
    'Svelte dictions' in a very florid hand.
     
    Ulster was British, but with no rights on
    The English lyric: all around us, though
    We hadn't named it, the ministry of fear.
     

2. A CONSTABLE CALLS
     
    His bicycle stood at the window-sill,
    The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher
    Skirting the front mudguard,
    Its fat black handlegrips
     
    Heating in sunlight, the 'spud'
    Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,
    The pedal treads hanging relieved
    Of the boot of the law.
     
    His cap was upside down
    On the floor, next his chair.
    The line of its pressure ran like a bevel
    In his slightly sweating hair.
     
    He had unstrapped
    The heavy ledger, and my father
    Was making tillage returns
    In acres, roods, and perches.
     
    Arithmetic and fear.
    I sat staring at the polished holster
    With its buttoned flap, the braid cord
    Looped into the revolver butt.
     
    'Any other root crops?
    Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?'
    'No.' But was there not a line
    Of turnips where the seed ran out
     
    In the potato field? I assumed
    Small guilts and sat
    Imagining the black hole in the barracks.
    He stood up, shifted the baton-case
     
    Further round on his belt,
    Closed the domesday book,
    Fitted his cap back with two hands,
    And looked at me as he said goodbye.
     
    A shadow bobbed in the window.
    He was snapping the carrier spring
    Over the ledger. His boot pushed off
    And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.
     

3. ORANGE DRUMS, TYRONE, 1966
     
    The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs
    Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder
    Grossly there between his chin and his knees.
    He is raised up by what he buckles under.
     
    Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,
    He parades behind it. And